Thomas J. DiLorenzo reviews University of Pennsylvania political science professor Anne Norton’s new book, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire.
So much attention thus far has been focussed on Wolfowitz, Perle, Hadley, Feith, Kagan, and the Kristols that it’s a bit of shock to see how entrenched these ideologues are in the bowels of this administration. Thanks to scholars like Shadia Drury, whose interview in Hijacking Catastrophe is a must see, I’m not in the dark as to what their game is all about, their reasoning for operating behind a curtain, or why this particular administration has been so receptive to their ear whispering campaigns.
In my opinion, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are personalities that were ripe for their picking. You have George who spent most of his life in the altered state of addiction going from one failed venture to another only to be “saved” from his own devices by an evangelical preacher who bestowed upon him the healing power and deeply intimate acquaintance of God. He now maintains a personal hotline to his creator through which he enjoys instantaneous forgiveness of his recurring transgressions, a pact of privilege and secrecy to which he figures he’s entitled as leader not only of the free world but of a Christian nation, and only by lying to the liberal, sinful masses will he get their support for his necessary and divine goals. Power has become this dry drunk’s drug of choice and it trumps the sort of power he was denied in his daddy’s boardrooms. His mission is God’s.
T.D. Allman’s profile of Cheney in Rolling Stone paints a picture of a serial blunderer whose ability to bullshit his investors is how he pulled his fat from the fires of his political failures. In his partisan-driven mania to create a one-party state it was his deceptive self-promotion that kept him in the game.
“Cheney’s manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities,” says Chas Freeman, who served under Bush’s father as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It was clear from the start that Bush required adult supervision — but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on the ass.”
When the election of Bill Clinton relieved Cheney of his second opportunity to influence an executive branch he sought refuge in neconservative think tanks. Someone like Cheney willing to employ any means necessary to achieve a fanatastical goal, one who survived his shortcomings by misrepresenting them as strengths, and in his privileged and guarded opinion believed the country needed ultimately to be saved from itself, he must have considered the neocons to be the ultimate mark. Rumsfeld, his comrade in arms for so many years, is an obsessive-compulsive who catalogues every bit of debris found on his ranch, is a hoarder of 9/11 artifacts, is a micro-manager who inundates his underlings with “snowflakes.” Is it any wonder he’s now shuffling human beings in the same manner? The “disorder” of the “untidy” world must make his brain boil.
Leo Strauss despised liberal democracy as the mechanism that brought Hitler to power so his work focussed on stripping the slovenly masses of their individual voices in govt., thereby destroying it, because they are too stupid to know what’s good for them. He taught his disciples, the neoconservatives, that in their role as society’s saviours and intellectual superiors they would find it necessary to employ the gullible, not-so-smart, “gentlemenly” quarters of the military and govt. to go forth and represent their propaganda as fact to the unwashed if their schemes to reorder the world could ever hope to succeed. But without a coalition of the willing at the top, in this case the harvest of George, Dick, and Don, they would fail.
Daniel Ellsberg has made yet another plea to those select, “gentlemenly” few (or to the Straussians’ chagrin, gentlewomenly fewer, who should be at home spitting out babies for perpetual warring) with access to damaging documents to bring them forth immediately and lay all doubts to waste Americans were intentionally misled into supporting the illegal occupation of Iraq.
Karen Kwiatkowski has been tireless in offering up first-hand accounts of the fiction mill that was operating in the Pentagon when she worked there as it was busily churning out propaganda the Bush administration coordinated and deployed.
Unfortunately, I think Ellsberg is correct that paper in hand cannot be denied, or as Kwiatkowski has experienced, be personally smeared for an allegedly racist agenda.
Whether there is a true patriot in possession of such facts willing to come forward is a lot to hang the future of a democracy on.
There has to be another way.
Pingback: karmalised